Never mind the fact that his disastrously conceived (and named) “Great Leap Forward” killed an estimated 45 million human beings. Then there were the political purges, the labor camps, the exterminations, the execution quotas, etc. In all, Mao is suspected of killing an estimated 70 million people with his brand of genocidal totalitarianism. But other than all of that, yes, he was “one history’s great revolutionary figures.”

It was not long before social media users noticed and took exception on Monday to the Times’ weirdly glowing description of the 20th century’s most prolific mass murderer. The pushback became such that the paper deleted the tweet eventually, issuing a sort of half-hearted mea culpa.